Consumer Goods Forum Launches Food Waste Coalition

Earlier this week, the Consumer Goods Forum launched a CEO-led Coalition of Action on Food Waste. The effort bringing together 14 of the world's largest retailers and manufacturers. The coalition seeks to cut global food loss at the retailer and consumer level in half.

The coalition said food waste is an enormous environmental, social and economic problem. A third of food produced is never eaten, which amounts to about 1.3 billion metric tons of food lost each year. That represents an economic cost to the global economy of $940 billion. Food waste is also responsible for adding 3.3 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases into the planet’s atmosphere annually, so if food waste were a country, its carbon footprint would be third only to China and the United States.

The coalition includes CEOs from General Mills, Kellogg Company, Walmart and others. The group will first collect data on food waste before forming a plan to prevent food waste.

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